Tuberculosis and leprosy, caused by the bacilli from the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex and M. leprae respectively are the two major mycobacterial diseases. Pathogenic mycobacteria have the ability to survive within host phagocytic cells. From the interactions between the host and the bacteria results the pathology of the tuberculosis infection through the damages the host immune response causes on tissues (Andersen & Brennan, 1994). Alternatively, the protection of the host is also dependent on its interactions with mycobacteria.
Identification of the bacterial antigens involved in these interactions with the immune system is essential for the understanding of the pathogenic mechanisms of mycobacteria and the host immunological response in relation to the evolution of the disease. It is also of great importance for the improvement of the strategies for mycobacterial disease control through vaccination and immunodiagnosis.
Through the years, various strategies have been followed for identifying mycobacterial antigens. Biochemical tools for fractionating and analysing bacterial proteins permitted the isolation of antigenic proteins selected on their capacity to elicit B or T cell responses (Romain et al., 1993; Sorensen et al., 1995). The recent development of molecular genetic methods for mycobacteria (Jacobs et al., 1991; Snapper et al., 1990; Hatful, 1993; Young et al., 1985) allowed the construction of DNA expression libraries of both M. tuberculosis and M. leprae in the λgt11 vector and their expression in E. coli The screening of these recombinant libraries using murine polyclonal or monoclonal antibodies and patient sera led to the identification of numerous antigens (Braibant et al., 1994; Hermans et al., 1995; Thole & van der Zee, 1990). However, most of them turned out to belong to the group of highly conserved heat shock proteins (Thole & van der Zee, 1990; Young et al., 1990).
The observation in animal models that specific protection against tuberculosis was conferred only by administration of live BCG vaccine, suggested that mycobacterial secreted proteins might play a major role in inducing protective immunity. These proteins were shown to induce cell mediated immune responses and protective immunity in guinea pig or mice model of tuberculosis (Pal & Horwitz, 1992; Andersen, 1994; Haslow et al., 1995). Recently, a genetic methodology for the identification of exported proteins based on PhoA gene fusions was adapted to mycobacteria by Lim et al. (1995). It permitted the isolation of M. tuberculosis DNA fragments encoding exported proteins. Among them, the already known 19 kDa lipoprotein (Lee et al., 1992) and the ERP protein similar to the M. leprae 28 kDa antigen (Berthet et al., 1995).